The new indicator extends and replaces the optional experimental ibus-gnome3 gnome-shell extension that has been in Fedora from F16.

Benefit to Fedora

Users will have native gnome-shell support for ibus input methods seamlessly integrated with the current gnome support for keyboard layouts.

With the ibus integration in gnome-shell, ibus input methods will be listed in the control-center region panel and in the gnome-shell input indicator, without having to use the separate ibus-setup tool.

Contingency Plan

gnome-3.6 is planning to support ibus, but in the worst case ibus support could be disabled from gnome-settings-daemon, imsettings could be reenabled for gnome, and ibus reverted to using the ibus upstream applet in the gnome panel.

The item will be postponed to GNOME 3.8 (Fedora 19) below.

gnome-initial-setup provides the default IMEs and XKBs list.

Currently ibus-anthy shows the IME menus. Probably we'll evaluate the menus again in the next release.